Lyin' Heart

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Lyin' Heart Page 6

by Erika Masten


  Aubrey had stripped the woman without hesitation or hindrance and hadn’t given her a moment to think about it or a chance to lose her nerve. And she might have—Ellie might well have let her self-consciousness overcome her newfound boldness—had it not been for the mesmerizing way Aubrey moved as he bared himself to her. He peeled his wet pants away from that delicious V of pronounced muscle along his hips and groin, little by little, along one hip and then the other, baring first one high, firm ass cheek and then the second.

  The tight gray briefs he wore did little to contain his enormous erection or the swell of his heavy balls. Like most male cat shifters that Ellie had seen shirtless, Aubrey had little hair on his tanned body, save for a tantalizing line of sparse golden hair more like light fur trailing down from low on his stomach below the waistband of the briefs and matching the fine dusting of hair along his thick, corded thighs. Powerful, tensed thighs…. Ellie couldn’t stop staring at his legs and….

  He moved over Ellie with the sudden grace of the predatory beast he was. The man slid his wet body and hot skin against hers with only the thin material of their underwear between his hungry cock and her tender, aching pussy, between his seeking, kneading, calloused hands and her tingling breasts. And with nothing at all between his lips and hers except his driving tongue as he took Ellie’s mouth with a furious kiss and a growl.

  Ellie might not have been able to shift, but she had her own animal instincts. These flared and panicked, just a little, just enough that her hands flew to Aubrey’s broad shoulders to cling to him. To dig nails into his skin. To push and pull and fuss and resist.

  The werelion abruptly tore his mouth from hers with a ragged huff of impatience. He raised up from her enough to seize her wrists. Aubrey jerked Ellie’s arms up over her head and pinned them to the bed.

  Even moaning and gasping with the thrill of this forceful handling, Ellie couldn’t help writhing and struggling. He responded by locking his arms, which pushed her down harder against the mattress, and gazing down at her with luminous blue eyes. The man pointedly watched her reaction as he pressed his groin and prodding cock down over her hips and the along the twitching lips of her pussy. He bucked and ground against the woman ruthlessly, pinning her lower body to the bed and tormenting her clit with overwhelming friction and heat.

  “You want to resist me first, wildcat?” he panted. Lord, what a sound. So deep and rough. “Go ahead. I like it, too. Your animal needs it, doesn’t she? To struggle until the lion makes her stop? Until the beast overpowers her and bares her and mounts her as hard and wild as she can take? Until it forces her to submit to being fucked? Forces the pleasure on her?” Aubrey changed his grip to hold Ellie’s wrists with just one of his large, strong hands and freed the other to reach down and rip the woman’s panties from between their bodies with a sudden shriek of tearing material. “I want it that way too.”

  Aubrey stretched out fully atop Ellie’s flushed body, putting enough of his weight on her to make her feel his presence and his power over her. He used that free hand to yank one lace bra cup down and bare her pale breast. Tingles shot through her even before the lion went after her with his mouth, laving and sucking ravenously. A fine scruff of five o-clock shadow had come up on his normally clean-shaven face during the long day and now abused her sensitive skin while she mewled in delight. Aubrey massaged her flesh as though he relished it, as though he owned it and everything he made her feel as he touched it.

  He released her pebble-hard nipple to trail his teeth up along the full curve of her breast and then the column of her neck. Between taunting, nipping kisses along Ellie’s jaw, Aubrey said, “You’ve teased me too much, wildcat. There’s no time now for seduction.”

  She’d lost track of his wickedly deft caresses while paying too much attention to his kisses and hot breath. She abruptly felt his fingertips tracing the lips of her pussy. Ellie jerked beneath him with the sudden thrill, at the indecent exploration of his fingers beginning to open her.

  “No time,” he purred again, “for tasting this sweet pussy or seeing how wicked you look with my cock in your mouth. Next time, wildcat. This time, I just can’t wait to fuck you. That’s what you get for every moment of rock-hard frustration you’ve put me through.”

  Ellie groaned and rolled her body under Aubrey’s. “Do it.” She didn’t want foreplay right now, either, even if it meant waiting for the next time he took her to feel his tongue inside her and his caresses absolutely everywhere. Especially if it meant there was going to be next time. “Fuck me.”

  “Is that a please I hear?” he asked. As much as the amusement in his deep voice infuriated her, it was also just so damn sexy.

  He wasn’t actually going to make her beg, Ellie realized when she felt him push his briefs down and begin to guide the broad head of his cock between the wet folds of her sex. His cockhead nudged at the tight ring of tender muscle inside her, and her snug opening began to flare with an alarming mix of pain-pleasure.

  “Yes,” she breathed, her muscles starting to tighten and brace in apprehension, in anticipation. “Yes.”

  “Ellie,” he moaned, and that was probably the sexiest thing she had ever heard Aubrey say—her name as an exclamation of pleasure as he prepared to penetrate her.

  The pounding on the door of the carriage house suite sent a jolt of surprise up along Ellie’s spine that was physically painful in what has been so intimate a state a split second before.

  When Aubrey whipped his head around to look at the door, the shimmer of his lion trying to force a shift was already glowing brightly on his skin. With his incisors pushing out, a quarter inch longer than they had been a moment before, the shifter snarled.

  “What the fuck—?”

  “Drummond, I know you’re in there.”

  Ty Abrams, Ellie realized. Ty Fucking Abrams. What the hell had Caroline stirred up now?

  “Aubrey Drummond,” the Itan said again.

  This time the bear clan leader’s tone held a note of authority that cut through the impatience of Ellie’s interrupted lust. And through Aubrey’s, too, she suspected by the feel of the man drawing away from her as though preparing to leap off the bed toward the door.

  “Your bag’s still out here, lion. And as I can’t find her anywhere else around this place, I am betting Ellie Lowe is in there with you. This door opens in three seconds whether you do it or I do.”

  Chapter 10

  The manor house on the forested compound of the Grayslake bear clan, the main building that was home to Ty Abrams and his mate, Mia, had all the grace and glory of a true southern estate. The multi-pane windows, and the shutters, and the columns on either side of the front door. Downstairs, however, that southern sophistication somewhat dissipated.

  Aubrey wasn’t actually standing inside the 15x30 cell in the manor house basement, but the door was open. And the semi-circle of bear shifters pressing up around him gaped only in one place, in the direction of that door.

  With Abrams and the other heavy-duty male shifters among the bear clan surrounding them, Aubrey didn’t try to whisper as he looked down at Ellie where she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “As attractive as I find that stubborn streak of yours, insisting on staying with me for this might have been… ill-advised.”

  The lion shifter also had a sinking feeling he was going to have to face things in front of Ellie that he’d been trying to avoid these last few weeks. While he had been slowly falling for her. While she’d been warming to him and the idea that maybe she didn’t have to fight the whole world by herself anymore.

  Ty Abrams stood with his arms folded, his shoulders relax, looking like the least tense of the bear clan members in the room but no less imposing or powerful for it. “Yeah, we talked about that,” the Itan told Aubrey. “Our women in these parts don’t really take suggestions about how they ought to behave.”

  “Our women?” Ellie snapped, and Aubrey knew he shouldn’t have been surprised that she was still showing teeth, even in this
situation. “Maybe the problem is exactly that sense of ownership,” she suggested sharply. “You all want to dictate how I behave. How I run my business. How I raise my son. Then again, Caroline Heath is just as bad, so maybe the problem is bears instead of men.” She glared at Aubrey, who was on her bad side again. Ellie had obviously figured out that they were here for something he had done, for a change. “Bears and lions,” she amended.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Ty told her. “These days, everybody is in everybody else’s business.” He narrowed his gaze at Aubrey as he added, “Aren’t they? What about your business, Mr. Drummond? Do you want to start talking to me straight about what the Panthera’s real business is in Grayslake?”

  “The Panthera?” Ellie repeated and joined Ty in the glare aimed at the lion shifter. From her reaction, Aubrey felt he could safely assume Ellie had heard of the werecat clan alliance, the largest of its kind and the most influential. The most self-important and mercenary, as well.

  All around them the young male bear shifters were getting restless—growly and grumbly, as the saying went. Aubrey didn’t see a way around having to answer the clan leader’s questions.

  “Let’s make it easy for you,” Abrams said. “Start with the reservoir. What’s going on up there, and what do you have to do with it?”

  Aubrey couldn’t help visibly tensing up. “How did you—?”

  But that was a dumb question. It had obviously been one of Ty’s bear clan who caught the lion shifter up there a few days back.

  “There’s been a lot of government activity, operations against shifter clans of all species, in the surrounding states. Tennessee and South Carolina, in particular. Part of my assignment was to see if those operations had moved into or were at least based in Georgia. The forest service job gives me a reason to be seen out on those federal lands, the most remote parts, where a lot of decommissioned service buildings give the Agency a place to dig in and nest.”

  “Dig in for what?” Abrams asked. “And why didn’t you think my clan had a right to know there was some sort of government operation setting itself up off our back porch?”

  Aubrey frowned and tilted his head, unappreciative of being treated like a greenhorn. “That reservoir is outside your territory, not on it, and their road in and out takes them the opposite direction of Grayslake. I don’t know what kind of an operation it is yet, but it looks like support. If it had been a staging area for an obvious strike team, then you and your clan would have known it as soon as I did.”

  “That’s comforting,” Ty quipped.

  “That’s bullshit,” one of his boys said and earned a grumble of agreement from his clan brothers. “Can’t trust a fucking werecat.”

  “Language,” Ty warned them, then rubbed his forehead. “Jeez, Mia’s got me doing it now, too.” The Itan glanced meaningfully from Ellie to Aubrey before telling the lion shifter, “Mine doesn’t allow cussing in her presence.”

  His what? Aubrey realized with a stab of both distress and a surge of possessive pride that Ty Abrams was insinuating that the two werecats were forming a mating bond. The lion suspected that the only reason Ty didn’t get an earful from Ellie over that was because she was pouting too hard to stop and think about the inference.

  Now Abrams got down to the real meat of the matter. “And what does this have to do with the Panthera’s interest in establishing itself in Grayslake? This fugitive safe house of yours, where you want to hide innocent werecat who’ve come up on the wrong side of the Agency…. What are you really trying to do in my territory?”

  Aubrey didn’t look at Ellie as he formulated the answer. Knowing she was standing there next to him clouded his mind. Knowing what she was going to think when she realized that Aubrey had lied, and how much he had lied. It made his stomach hurt and his head ache, the thought of how she was going to take it, of how used she was going to feel.

  A couple hours before, the way she’d looked at him and been with him—she wasn’t ever going to give that to him again. True, he hadn’t deserved that gift from her in the first place, but….

  Just say it, Aubrey. Just fucking say it.

  “My assignment was to locate an appropriate place within the Grayslake bear clan territory to establish a werecat safe house… a safe house for Panthera intelligence agents, not civilian fugitives. Grayslake is outside the main body of Agency anti-shifter activity, but it’s close enough to act as a planning station for Panthera anti-intelligence operations against the government strike teams. I….”

  Aubrey paused to swallow, a little surprised now that he’d gotten rolling how hard it was to say this in front of Ellie, even while not looking at her.

  “I proposed acquiring and using the Garden Gate Bed & Breakfast as a cover for agents moving in and out of the area. The advantage of locating in Grayslake is, of course, that this clan is one of the strongest in the region, and its leader is local law enforcement. Even with your clan not actively involved in anti-Agency activities, we would’ve benefited from the fact that nothing could’ve approached us without passing through you.”

  “Son of a—,” the bear shifter to the right of Abrams started to say.

  The Itan, nodding, cut that thought off. “That’s a pretty sound strategy, I have to give you.” It was a sentiment that obviously shocked the wary bears around him. “And you assumed you had to come to us with this story about civilian refugees hiding from Agency hunters because we wouldn’t willingly put ourselves and our families and our human neighbors in danger by allowing you to establish a counterintelligence enclave in our town.”

  Aubrey nodded as well.

  “Also sound,” Abrams told him, “because I wouldn’t have agreed. It brings the kind of trouble that we now find on the other side of that lake.”

  “Which was not my doing,” Aubrey protested. “I just discovered that group setting up at the reservoir. Technically, I did you a favor by—.”

  Abrams held up his hand, as much to shut Aubrey up as to restrain the bear shifters who started forward toward the lion. “Don’t go there, true or not.” Then the bear clan leader motioned toward that cell door. “Have a seat inside, both of you.” When the werecats started to protest, Ty shook his head. “Don’t make this bigger than it has to be. The door is going to stay open. But you need to give me a few minutes to talk with my boys without a lot of twisted werecat justifications keeping everybody stirred up and angry.”

  Even Ellie couldn’t argue with that logic, seeing as how red-faced and agitated the bears had become.

  For the first few minutes, Aubrey and Ellie sat side-by-side, though not touching, on a cot in the cell. The werecats remained quiet and still, hardly breathing, though Aubrey wasn’t sure if it was because they were both straining to listen to the voices beyond the cell or because of the voices of their own thoughts in their heads. The last time the lion shifter had felt this sort of weight in his chest and his gut, it’d been when Vanessa had learned he lied to her about their parents being shifters, how they had died, and about her own animal nature—when he’d stood in front of his sister and her werewolf mate and justified being an Agency hunter to protect himself and his only sibling from the government.

  A few minutes was all it took. Aubrey couldn’t stand Ellie’s silence.

  “Say something,” he told her.

  She took a soft, slow breath before she whispered her response. The woman didn’t look at him as she spoke. “All that time back at the B&B, I really believed you.”

  Chapter 11

  Cell doors were made to be locked, and moments like this were the reason why.

  The truth about Aubrey Drummond—Aubrey Dreyer, as it turned out—had hit Ellie in the gut and knocked the breath out of her just when she’d gotten that second wind to help her feel…. Well, she’d almost felt like she could handle everything that had gone haywire in her life since her parents had passed and she’d brought her baby sister with her to Georgia looking for a new start.

  There was no way the bears sh
ould have left that cell door open, not once Caroline Heath had come rushing into the room. And certainly not after she’d blurted, “That bastard took him. Right out of the front yard of the Tate’s house before we could get there. He took my Mason.”

  Ellie’s wildcat came up as strong as if she’d been a manifested shifter. Her body might not have changed, but everything inside her was pure, enraged mama cat at hearing Caroline’s voice. At the possessiveness in the she-bear’s tone when that bitch had the nerve to call Mason hers. And then at the idea that after these damn bears had belittled her about not being able to raise her son right herself, they’d brought her here with their political bullshit, and while she was gone someone had… Someone had taken… The only thing Ellie had left to fight for. It was too much.

  She might’ve been a curvy girl, but the werecat was off the cot, through that door, and on top of Caroline Heath before even one of the damn bears could stop her. By the time they pulled the women apart, both of them were bloodied and Caroline’s shift was coming out.

  The she-bear’s eyes were black, teeth coming out long and sharp, when Ty Abrams stepped in front of her and grabbed her by the throat. It was the first time Ellie had really heard or seen the Itan wield his full authority over one of his clan members when they were out of line. And it worked, even on Ellie and on Aubrey where he stood behind her with one arm protectively restraining the wildcat.

  “On your knees,” Abrams commanded, and after a second, Caroline Heath sank down before him. A moment later, the two male clan members who had barged in at her side realized their trespass and knelt as well, heads bowed. “I swear, Caroline, between you and Ellie Lowe and this Panthera business, with the Agency on top of all of that, I’ve had about all I’m willing to take of people pushing my patience.”

 

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